As the use of mobile wireless devices, such as smart phones and tablet devices, becomes more ubiquitous, the demands on the limited amount of radio frequency spectrum used by those devices has increased, resulting in wireless network congestion and reduced bandwidth for devices operating in the licensed spectrum. A variety of techniques have been introduced to provide additional bandwidth, including data offloading from a Wireless Wide Area Network (WWAN) to other networks such as another WWAN or a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). For example, data may be offloaded from a 3G or 4G WWAN operating in accordance with a standard from the 3GPP standards family, to a Wi-Fi WLAN operating in accordance with a standard from the 802.11 standards family.
With existing data offloading techniques provided with use of some 3GPP wireless network standards, and in other settings, a WLAN access network is treated as an untrusted access network. This causes WLAN access to attach to a 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) using an Evolved Packet Data Gateway (ePDG). An additional Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) tunnel also may need to be established between the mobile device and the ePDG. This causes extra tunneling and encryption overhead for all communication between the mobile wireless device and the 3GPP EPC.